The Super Beacon can do so because it has the capacity to couple with the beacons in its vicinity and then “call home” via WiFi. You can toggle the frequency with which it calls home and manage the cloud beacon itself much as you manage a beacon’s advertising intervals and settings to conserve power.

Packing additional punch, the Super Beacon also does passive WiFi monitoring to detect the presence of mobile devices in the vicinity. For data-conscious enterprise, this allows a more thorough data set of visitors – telling you, for example, that there were 1,000 visitors to your store and that 10% had a beacon-enabled app.

But Super Beacon represents the larger move to an Internet of Things in which relatively dumb and simple devices are nodes in a larger web of connected devices.

As beacons evolve to include mesh capabilities, to carry more data, to connect with more things, the concept of connected spaces won’t be enabled by single devices but by a cloud of services and gizmos each serving a purpose within the larger task of making the physical world a digital interface.